The book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is about Ender Wiggin, a boy of above-average intelligence, which means he is recruited to be trained to be one of the commanders of Earth's "Defense" Fleet should the Buggers invade again (future books renamed the Buggers to the Formics, to be more politically correct, since the British consider Bugger to be a swear word). Ender is taken to a space school called Battle School. At the center of Battle School is the Battle Room, where all the training revolves (literally and figuratively) around.

The Battle Room is described as a hollow perfect cube. "Stars" (smaller cubes) can be pulled from the walls (without changing the shape, more stars come in to fill the space where the old ones were) and can be used as obstacles in the Battle Room, as they will remain absolutely stationary, no matter what force is exerted on them. There is no gravity in the Battle Room. Most squads entering the Battle Room keep their orientation from the hallway (gravity in the hallway dictates where "down" is in the Room). Ender realizes that because the room is a perfect cube, and that even the entrances, called "gates," are perfect squares and do not give any hint about which direction is up or down, that keeping that orientation is useless. He instructs his squad to orient so that the enemy's gate is down, a line of lateral thinking that gives his team three big advantages (smaller targets, "shielding" themselves with their own feet, and unprecedented angles of attack) and leads them to a perfect winning streak.

The joke here, as made by Ender's squadmate Dink, is that the enemy's gate is "down," as in broken. A computer or a website is said to be "down" when it stops operating or is unavailable, due to a cause such as a crash, the power is cut, or it is being taken down for maintenance.

The title text suggests that the enemy's gate was sabotaged by Bean, another, more tech smart, friend of Ender's, for the sole reason of allowing Dink to make the joke. This reflects how in the book Ender's Shadow, it is revealed that actually Bean was pulling most strings behind the scenes of Ender's Game.

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